The Bloody Sunday inquiry has set about tracing British officers whose voices are heard on a tape-recording said to have been made with the aid of an IRA telephone tap on lines into an army barracks on the day of the shootings.
Counsel to the tribunal, Mr Christopher Clarke QC, told the resumed hearing yesterday, however, that it is anxious to acquire a copy or original version of the tape which is said to have been seized by Special Branch gardai in a raid on the home of a Sinn Fein member in May 1976.
He said inquiries had been made to the Garda Commissioner and the Taoiseach's Office, but as yet no substantive reply had been received.
Counsel said there had been newspaper reports in 1973 that a tape was recorded by means of telephone-tapping at Victoria Barracks in Derry at the time of Bloody Sunday.
A statement given to the inquiry by Mr James Ferry said that he was a member of Sinn Fein at the time and was given a tape of phone calls to and from the barracks that had been illicitly recorded. He said the tape, or copy, was seized by Special Branch officers when his house was raided on May 5th, 1976.
The inquiry has received a copy of a tape and transcript, supplied to it in September by Messrs McCartney & Casey, solicitors, who said they had received these anonymously.
Sections of the tape were played yesterday and contained references made by an officer to "things going badly" and "the wrong people" being shot. Another voice refers to the shootings as a "pretty good bloodbath".
Only weeks after they were involved in the Bloody Sunday shootings, members of the Parachute Regiment were engaged in torturing and dumping the body of a man they arrested at Divis Flats in Belfast, according to diary entries attributed to one of their fellow soldiers.
The claim is made in documents sent to the inquiry by the Irish Government last September and purporting to be part of a diary kept by the paratrooper who has been given the tribunal witness number, Soldier 027.